Slashdot Mirror
Spammers Discover Kindle Self-Publishing
innocent_white_lamb writes "Make it easy to self-publish books and the spammers will be right along too. Amazon's Kindle marketplace has been deluged by low-quality 'books' selling for 99 cents each. '[Thousands of ebooks published each month] are built using something known as Private Label Rights, or PLR content, which is information that can be bought very cheaply online then reformatted into a digital book. These ebooks are listed for sale – often at 99 cents – alongside more traditional books on Amazon’s website, forcing readers to plow through many more titles to find what they want. Aspiring spammers can even buy a DVD box set called Autopilot Kindle Cash that claims to teach people how to publish 10 to 20 new Kindle books a day without writing a word.'"
rtfa
People don't write 20 books a day about how to fix your roof (and if someone did write a book on how to fix a roof, he wouldn't sell it for a dollar).
What they do is run a web spider, aggregate random blog text found on Google by whatever search term is popular that week, apply some automated formatting then sell the results. Then spam their own ratings with bots.
You would not even have to charge a fee, just a deposit that is returned when you have sold enough books. That would filter out spammers and real authors could get their money back after selling a few titles.